Who Was That Man?

My Great-Aunt Dolores claimed to have had a child once. She couldn't remember what she did with it though – she pretended to have lost it in the Blitz when she thought it may have fallen out of the pram as she was running for cover during an air-raid. I am immediately suspicious of this theory, however – there is more than one element to the story that doesn't quite add up. For a start, I've often heard Dolores state that she spent the entire war years abroad - sometimes claiming that she was working in occupied France for la Résistance; at other times boasting that she was in Casablanca for the whole duration, apparently drinking in some American bar run by a lugubrious ex-pat called 'Rick'. Either way, she seems to have avoided the London Blitz.

Another reason her story somewhat stinks is that in all the years I knew her, I never witnessed Dolores 'run for cover' in any situation. She always asserted that anyone who couldn't face danger with a stoic stance and gritted teeth was nothing more than a 'pathetic sissy'. I always remember the time we were caught in the crossfire of a gun-battle somewhere in the Sudan – whilst I was trying to hide my head in a discarded biscuit tin, Dolores stood on the roof of a battered old Peugeot, took out her revolver, and with her famous ivory cigarette-holder clamped firmly between her teeth, shot back. So the image of her running panic-stricken through the blacked-out streets of London, frantically pushing a pram towards the air-raid shelter, seems difficult to conjure.

But I digress. Wherever she did (or did not) lose the child, I have little doubt that it existed. Or rather, he existed – for she did once let slip that the baby was a boy. Her motivation for having the child was as bizarre as was her excuse for losing him. She claimed that she had no interest whatsoever in breeding (that was something you did to pigs, she said), but she was apparently interested in the physical act of childbirth. This is a strange impetus for pregnancy at the best of times, but Dolores professed not to believe other women when they described the deplorable pain that giving birth entailed. "I thought it was all poppycock," she said. "My view was that these moaning, whimpering women were just pathetic sissies with no balls. I can tell you now, boy – I couldn't have been more wrong. Ejecting that little bastard was the toughest, most unpleasant thing I've ever done in my entire life. Well, that is if you discount the time I had lunch with Barbara Cartland and had to perform the Heimlich Manoeuvre on her when she choked on a fishbone."

Despite my gentle probing however, she never revealed much more. She was resolutely tight-lipped on the subject of the identity of the baby's father. "Let's just say boy, that if the child had been legitimate – which it clearly was not - then it would have carried a very impressive title indeed, and I wouldn't have needed to have taken to robbing banks."

So who is this long-lost second-cousin of mine? Is he still alive? Did he marry? Did he make any sort of name for himself? Perhaps he's a famous actor, politician, or business mogul? Perhaps he was 'Xylophone Man' who used to sit on the pavement outside the Council House in Nottingham, bashing out one of only three tunes in his repertoire (badly) on his child's toy xylophone? Who knows? Dolores took this secret with her to the grave (actually, she didn't have a grave – we burned her, and only restraint on our part prevented us from carrying out the act while she was still alive, but you know what I mean).

So, if there is anyone out there reading this who was born to mysterious parentage in 1941, please get in touch. And please, please, change your will as soon as possible (in my favour, of course).

Ooh, am I about to become rich?